Philosophy doesn’t need to be relevant to be meaningful.  I think of my own line of work of computer programming, where I learned how to program BASIC using punched tape on a PDP/11.  Everything I learned in class thirty years ago is now as useful as a slide rule.  But I’ve built on the broader skills that have allowed me to build a career.  These include questioning vendor documentation and user requests, approaching problems methodically, and thinking algorithmically.  Philosophical thinking is far from irrelevant in my world of commerce.  I’m especially fond of Nietzsche’s insight that people don’t always understand their true motivations and beliefs often are based on mistaken assumptions.   It can help us guide people using astute questions to their own conclusions using Socratic dialogues.  It also helps put the corporate world into perspective, to prevent us from being a creature of their culture, by reinforcing that there are times when the lone individual must stand up to the team and the organization.

        The best philosophical thought has a timeless quality.  Charles Malik, former Lebanese Ambassador to the United States, at a graduation address at my alma mater, said that “in the more important things in life, history does not disclose steady progress.  There are a few shining peaks of the spirit with many intervening sloughs and valleys:  Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoyevsky—we have nobody comparable to these men in our age. The decay of respect for the past, the decay of respect for authority, the decay of the notion of the classics—these are the banes of the age.”  Yet, I must admit a bias to philosophers who are work outside of institutions such as churches, think tanks, and universities.  These institutions compromise people who do their thinking, protestations to the contrary.  These institutions are gateways.  They let in certain people—the elites-- and keep out other people—the great unwashed.  And, when institutions filter people, they also filter ideas, including conflicting ideas.  I wonder what would have happened if they had called Jesus rabbi and had welcomed Paul to the academy.

         We must road test our thinking.  Some people love humanity in the abstract while having little understanding of individuals in the particular. They cannot stand Mary and Tom but love the masses, the people, the flock.  It’s man’s unique capacity to organize fellow humans into classes that gives him his most deadly ability, his willingness to inflict mass slaughter on his own kind.  It’s much easier to kills “Jews” or “Communists” or “Islamic terrorists” than it is to kill John and Josephine and Abdul.

           We can know without experiencing.  Some of the greatest children’s authors, for example, were never themselves parents.  But experience forces us to reevaluate our beliefs in the light of life.  And the thinking that emerges from that experience seems to me to be more authentic and applicable than scribblings made in the sterility of a university garret.  As much as I admire, for example, Saul Kripke’s theories on semantics, I consider his work inferior to, say, Eric Hoffer, the itinerant longshoreman and migratory field laborer.  Kripke, who has spent his professional life on college campuses, may generate more theses, but Hoffer has shaped more minds.  And, at the end of the day, that is the acid test of an enduring philosophy.          

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